The library began loaning out chargers last year in an endeavor supported by more than $1,000 from the Associated Student Government project funding pool. Since then, however, the chargers have either come back broken or ended up missing, circulation services supervisor Alice Tippit said.

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In the spring, the circulation desk received broken chargers whose bar codes had been replaced with those of other chargers, Tippit said. After this happened multiple times during the Reading Period following Spring Quarter, Tippit said she realized the initial theft was not an isolated incident. Three chargers ended up missing in this manner, she said. She added two others were never returned and two were broken.

“People noticed it would be easy to trick us and put a charger in there that is broken,” Tippit said. “That happened three times, which I find shocking when someone does something like that.”

Since circulation desk staff members noticed some students were replacing the library’s chargers with broken ones, they began marking the chargers with pen.

Gary Price (gprice@mediasourceinc.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area. Before launching INFOdocket, Price and Shirl Kennedy were the founders and senior editors at ResourceShelf and DocuTicker for 10 years. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com, and is currently a contributing editor at Search Engine Land.